I’ve been taking ScreenwritingU’s ProSeries classes, and as with any class of this sort there’s a lot that can cross over to other kinds of storytelling. As I write this post, having just finished reading Open, we’re starting the module on “The First 10 Pages” of a screenplay. So it’s fitting that Andre Agassi’s autobiography, Open, is a book I read and purchased because of its first page.
I first saw it at a bookstore maybe a year ago. It was on a whale (the islands in the middle of the store with all the featured books), and I picked it up and read page 1. Here it is:
I open my eyes and don’t know where I am or who I am. Not all that unusual — I’ve spent half my life not knowing. Still, this feels different. This confusion is more frightening. More total.
I look up. I’m lying on the floor beside the bed. I remember now. I moved from the bed to the floor in the middle of the night. I do that most nights. Better for my back. Too many hours on a soft mattress causes agony. I count to three, then start the long, difficult process of standing. With a cough, a groan, I roll onto my side, then curl into the fetal position, then flip over onto my stomach. Now I wait, and wait, for the blood to start pumping.
I’m a young man, relatively speaking. Thirty-six. But I wake as if ninety-six. After three decades of sprinting, stopping on a dime, jumping high and landing hard, my body no longer feels like my body, especially in the morning. Consequently my mind doesn’t feel like my mind. Upon opening my eyes I’m a stranger to myself, and while, again, this isn’t new, in the mornings it’s more pronounced. I run quickly through the basic facts. My name is Andre Agassi. My wife’s name is Stefanie Graf. We have two children, a son and a daughter, five and three. We live in Las Vegas, Nevada, but currently reside in a suite at the Four Seasons hotel in New York City, because I’m playing in the 2006 U.S. Open. My last U.S. Open. In fact my last tournament ever. I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have.
As this last piece of identity falls into place, I slide to my knees and in a whisper I say: Please let this be over.
Then: I’m not ready for it to be over.
A year later, I still remembered that first page. The screaming irony of it all: that a soft mattress, or standing up in the morning, causes this great athlete complete agony. That he’s thirty-six but feels ninety-six. And, most importantly, that one of the best tennis players in the world hates tennis and always has. And then most excruciating irony of them all: “Please let this be over. I’m not ready for it to be over.”
If you want to capture someone in a screenplay, or in a book, and get them to read the whole thing you have to create intrigue. And what better way to do that than to expose this kind of irony? What better way than to provide an opening with more questions than answers?
And that’s the beautiful thing about this one. Watching the agony he experiences in the first few paragraphs just getting out of bed is enough to get us to read the next few. “I play tennis for a living, even though I hate tennis, hate it with a dark and secret passion, and always have,” will get us to read at least through the next chapter — after all, we want to find out why he plays it if he hates it so much. But those last two lines: “Please let this be over. I’m not ready for it to be over,” will get us to read all the way to the end of the book, because we want to see why, if he hates it so much, he doesn’t want to stop.
In case you’re wondering, the rest of the book is excellent. This prologue chapter continues with a blisteringly suspenseful account of the match he plays that afternoon (a match he won, as was the case with many of his wins, during his afternoon shower), and then in the next chapter we start over from Agassi’s youth. The middle may drag out a bit as it delves mercilessly into the battered self-immolation that was most of his career (in particular I think he spends a tad too much time dwelling on the details of individual matches), but I think it serves us well to capture the agony of the lows before rising out of the ashes to the sweet, understated climax that’s so perfectly befitting a professional athlete’s career.
But I will always remember this first page, which is what got me to read the darn thing in the first place.
